The Fujinon 10-24mm f/4 OIS is Fuji's widest XF lens, zoom or prime, by a fairly good margin. At 15-36mm eq. range it bests the next widest, the 14mm f/2.8 (21mm eq.) lens by a full 5mm eq. Wide angle zooms are getting ever better, and this year two of them garnered honors in our Lens of the Year awards in the zoom lens category (the Canon 11-24mm f/4 L and the Olympus 7-14mm f/2.8 Pro).

We've already put the Fuji X-T10 solidly through its testing paces, and it's now earned a coveted Camera of the Year accolade of its own, so we felt it deserved a sort of victory lap... (actually, I just wanted to shoot with it some more, but that's just between you and me). So, since it had yet to meet the highly acclaimed Fujinon XF 10-24mm f/4 OIS in our lab, that seemed the right call for said victory lap.

The f/4 limitation is about the only drawback to this lens, but to go to f/2.8 would have likely made it prohibitively large and expensive. Having onbard OIS is a nice trade-off to not having f/2.8 though, and for most traditional wide angle shooting f/4 and smaller tends to be more than adequate.

(Images have been resized to fit this page and slightly adjusted in post, primarily to balance shadows and highlights. Clicking any image will take you to a carrier page where you can access the full resolution image as delivered straight from the camera, as well as EXIF data.)

Even at ISO 4000 and with the EV cranked down by .7, there was only enough ambient light in this very dim restaurant to afford a 1/20s shutter speed, which is the largest trade-off to the f/4 maximum aperture. But the Optical Image Stabilization built into the lens allowed for a handheld shot just the same, and f/4 still affords some degree of subject-to-background isolation.

1/340s / f/4 / ISO 800 / 25mm eq.
[Film Simulation > Classic Chrome]

Here's a more obvious example of the bokeh characteristics at f/4 by this lens, as the background is fairly distant compared to the previous example. This one's zoomed in a bit to better reach the subject, which was not quite reachable on foot.

Caffeine Priority is a new series of short photo-tidbits to ease you into your day, and give us a chance to share a bit more of what life’s like here at IR. We're more like a group of friends testing and talking about cameras and lenses than the buttoned-down, big-corporation world that some of our photo-friends at other companies work in; hopefully these little snippets will share some of that. So... grab another coffee and join in the conversation with us down below!